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Late last week a group of more than 200 white supremacists gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the victory of their guy: president-elect Donald Trump.

The leader of this ecstatic white supremacist group, the ambiguously titled National Policy Institute, and the man who roused his followers out of their seats and into spirited chants of “Hail Trump,” is alt-right hero Richard Spencer, a 38-year-old publisher who resides in a small Montana city called Whitefish. (This is also, coincidentally, the name of my favourite bagel spread on the brunch menu at the Pickle Barrel. Go figure.)

Spencer has the shiny hair and boyish charm of Ryan Seacrest, and the public speaking chops of Joseph Goebbels. During his address at the NPI event in Washington last week — a speech that has since gone viral — Spencer decried the “Luegenpresse” (in German, “lying press”) and affirmed that whites are “the Children of the Sun.”

Needless to say, this development has made many Jewish people — a.k.a. the Children of the Sunscreen — a little uneasy.

It’s been a rough month: first they came for our hummus (last week, Sabra Inc. recalled several of its dips because of possible Listeria contamination), and now we have to grapple with the very public resurgence of anti-Semitism in North America. What’s next?

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Joking aside, it can’t be pretty.

It’s true that in light of the white supremacist resurgence in the United States, president-elect Trump has “disavowed” Spencer’s brood of neo-Nazis. But he has not disavowed his pick for chief strategist: former Breitbart news executive Steve Bannon, a peerless peddler of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, misogynist and homophobic content. Yes, I know that in a former professional life Bannon invested in the show Seinfeld. I don’t care. History shows that certain white Christians are perfectly capable of laughing at jokes told by Jews, while at the same time — and this is the polite terminology — hating our guts.

And to those who believe the increasingly common claim that Jews need not worry about white supremacy in the age of Trump, because most of us are also white and thus equal heirs to the benefits of white privilege, I’d like to point out an important distinction. The white privilege of Jews may extend to preferential treatment when it comes to hailing a cab, talking our way out of a speeding ticket or walking around a department store unmolested by security guards. But our white privilege expires the moment the poisonous ideology of white supremacy manages to enter the mainstream. History shows us that as well.

This is why it is so maddening to Jews of my generation that some Jews, many of them older, many of them religious, have chosen to respond to Trump’s loyalty to Steve Bannon, and his winking at bigots on the campaign trail, not with abject horror but with a defeatist sigh. Or worse, with congratulations.

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, the Rabbinical Council of America took out a full-page ad in the New York Times “wishing Trump the greatest success” in healing a divided America, and requesting that he make good on his promise to recognize “Jerusalem as Israel’s capital” and to stand “firmly against the hateful and discriminatory rhetoric that is the underpinning of such anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations.”

What about the “hateful and discriminatory rhetoric” underpinning the Trump campaign itself? Does anti-Semitism at home not count when the administration that inspired it might eventually give a leg up to Jews abroad? To think so is to suggest that anti-Semitism is excusable if the trade-off is good for the state of Israel. To think so is madness.

Maybe it’s no surprise that many of the people trying to normalize Trump because doing so “might be good for Israel” are the same people who refuse to listen to a pop star they’ve never even heard of because they read in the Jerusalem Post that the singer insulted Benjamin Netanyahu. “Selena Gomez won’t be getting an iTunes download out of me!” someone’s Bubbe Greta might proclaim, while we all know full well that Bubbe Greta couldn’t pick Selena Gomez out of a lineup if her life depended on it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Bubbe Gretas of the world. But they need to understand how their recent stance looks to their grandchildren. This willingness to normalize a Trump presidency in the name of Israel is confounding and extremely disturbing for young Jewish people like myself, who grew up, with our grandparents’ blessing, learning about the Holocaust and having the words “Never again” practically etched into our brains.

It’s not that we genuinely believe another Holocaust is upon us. Far from it. But we’ve been consistently lectured since childhood to never, ever, under any circumstance, take a leader’s flirtation with anti-Semites and white supremacists with a grain of salt. It is the height of irony that the people dissuading us from so-called “alarmism” in the present moment are the same elders who made us alarmist in the first place. And good on them for doing so. Clearly, they were right to sound the alarm, as we were clearly wrong to roll our eyes at them. Why then, when it seems to matter so much, are they the ones rolling their eyes at us?

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